Wichita police investigate a call of a possible hostage situation near the corner of McCormick and Seneca in Wichita, Ks Thursday night 12/28. A man was fatally shot by a police officer in what is believed to be a gaming prank called "swatting." (Photo: Fernando Salazar /The Wichita Eagle via AP)

Brian Krebs remembers holding a roll of tape in his hand, about a dozen guns pointed at his head.

Two teenagers had called the police to Krebs’ house in Virginia in what is referred to as a swatting report. Krebs had been using a roll of tape as he worked around the house, and now thinks about how the police could have thought it was a weapon.

“I’ve long said this needs to be attempted murder,” Krebs told The Wichita Eagle on Friday. “Nine times out of 10 nobody gets hurt or nobody gets seriously hurt, but things can go wrong.”

Krebs, a former Washington Post reporter who covers cybersecurity, was a victim of swatting in 2013.

Swatting is when someone makes a call to a police department with a false story of a crime in progress – often with killing or hostages involved – in an attempt to draw a large number of police officers to a particular address. It’s often related to online gaming, such as when SWAT teams arrived as a gamer in Colorado was live-streaming.

Wichita police said swatting led to the shooting of a man in Wichita on Thursday night. Andrew Finch, 28, was shot and killed by a Wichita police officer when police responded to a false report of a killing and hostage situation.